The present invention relates to a method of peeling hard-boiled eggs and machines for carrying out this method.
The invention applies more particularly to the automatic peeling of hard-boiled eggs on an industrial scale such as notably in the hotelery industry (restaurants, canteens, etc.) or in organizations (hospitals, associations, etc.) where the consumption of hard-boiled eggs is very great.
Machines for peeling hard-boiled eggs are presently known using water under pressure for loosening the white of the egg from the shell and its membrane.
These machines give excellent results, but they operate manually and, when the white of the egg is driven out of the shell by the pressure of the water, it generally drags along the lower cap of said shell which is literally torn from the rest thereof. The peeling of the egg is therefore not complete and must be completed by a manual operation consisting of removing said cap which remains stuck to the white of the hard-boiled egg.
All of these manual operations obviously considerably reduce the output of the apparatus which perfectly suits family use or use in drinking establishments where the consumption of hard-boiled eggs is not very great; on the other hand, these devices have been shown to have an output clearly insufficient for use on the industrial scale when it is necessary to peel in a short time thousands of eggs, a task which customarily mobilizes a considerable staff.
Attempts at automating the operations of peeling hard-boiled eggs have already been made and various semi-automatic machines have been proposed, notably in U.S. Pat. No. 3,613,756. In order to improve output the machine disclosed in this American patent is designed so as to be able to simultaneously peel a great number of eggs arranged in baskets. It nonetheless has the drawback of necessitating a prior orientation of the eggs which must always be presented in the same direction. Further, this machine presents the same drawback as the manual machines, i.e., that the whites of the eggs which are ejected outside their shells carry with them a bit of the cap of said shell, which necessitates a supplementary peeling operation for eliminating the same.
The object of the present invention is therefore to propose a peeling method necessitating no preferred orientation of the eggs and thus permitting automating all the different operations and machines carrying out this method, said machines being entirely automatic, of simple design and compact and nevertheless permitting an elevated rate while necessitating no supplementary manual operation of peeling the egg whites extracted from their shells.